The rise of technocourts and governing the appification of justice

Partners: University of Amsterdam & Tilburg University
Type: PhD
Duration: 2023—2026

If we imagine courts we imagine buildings, places of legal expertise and authority. With the arrival of the internet and digitisation, however, our ideas of courts and their role in society has started to change. Technology companies are a driving force behind the development of a whole range of new justice-as-a-service offers that are re-defining and re-inventing the administration of justice in the algorithmic society. In addition, we see a push from platform companies to create new kinds of authority of adjucation, freed from jurisdictional constraints, national legislation and slow-working national court systems (for example the Facebook Oversight Board). The goal of this project is to describe and critically analyse the rise of new forms of techno-courts and the appification of justice, to explore, what, if any, are the existing procedures and arrangements for negotiating value conflicts and upholding judicial values, to examine how the shift to technocourts affects citizens’ ideas of, and expectations towards courts as instances of adjucation, and the role of legal expertise and which government frameworks (should) apply.